I’m a bit late with this, but Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings issued this challenge:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and we need more of you to do this, otherwise it may end…), is to:

1) Read Brenda Joyce Jerome’s post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog. She asks these questions:
* Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?
* Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?
* Did your interest stem from your child’s school project on genealogy?
* If you have been researching many years, it may be hard to pinpoint one reason for this journey.
2) Write your responses on your own blog, in a comment to this blog post, or in a note or comment on Facebook.

My youngest sister (“The Bairn”) started me off on our Scottish family history trail – she had an interest in family history from her early teens, and she interviewed our parents and grandparents, made notes and drew out a chart on a huge piece of yellow card (I still have it with all its relevant pencil scribbles). Many years later when she was married with a small baby, I was working part-time and feeling pretty bored with life, so she handed me the files in an effort to give me something interesting to do. I had done similar research work in one of my first jobs, and was familiar with the way things worked, so thought I might be able to take the family history back a few generations, and after my first couple of days, I was totally hooked – although things had moved on a lot in the meantime. No longer did I have to wait with a pencil and pad for a man with white gloves to bring me the Original Document! Yes, I picked up on the research where she left off, and no, it wasn’t to do with a child’s school genealogy project, and although I have been researching for many, many years, I’ll never NOT be able to pinpoint exactly how I started on this journey. Cheers, Bairn 🙂 I’m still having so much fun with Scottish genealogy, years later and it’s thanks to you having the right idea for me at the right time! 🙂